Distinguishing driver and passenger phone use is a building block for a variety of mobile applications. And its greatest promise lies in helping reduce driver distraction. Cell phone distractions have been a factor in high-profile accidents and are associated with a large number of automobile accidents. This work utilizes smartphone sensing of vehicle dynamics to determine the driver phone use, which can facilitate many traffic safety applications. We explore a low-infrastructure approach that senses acceleration due to vehicle dynamics to decide on phone position. Our system uses embedded sensors in smartphones, i.e., accelerometer and gyroscope, to capture differences in centripetal acceleration due to vehicle dynamics. These differences, combined with angular speed, can determine whether the phone is on the left or right side of the vehicle. Our approach involves low infrastructure and is flexible with different turn sizes and driving speeds. Extensive experiments conducted with two vehicles in two different cities demonstrate that our system is robust to real-road driving environments. Despite the noisy sensor readings from smartphones, our approach can achieve a classification accuracy of over 90%, with a few percentage points of false positive rate. We also find that by combining sensing results in a few turns, we can achieve better accuracy (e.g., 95%) with a lower false positive rate. I will also sketch our recent study towards a completely infrastructure-free approach for driver phone use determination.

Yingying (Jennifer) Chen is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology. Her research interests include cyber security and privacy, mobile computing and pervasive computing, and mobile healthcare. She received her Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Rutgers University. She has coauthored the book Securing Emerging Wireless Systems and published over 90 journal articles and referred conference papers. Prior to joining Stevens Institute of Technology, she was with Alcatel-Lucent. She received the IEEE Outstanding Contribution Award from IEEE New Jersey Coast Section each year 2005-2009. She is the recipient of the NSF CAREER award on wireless security and Google Faculty Research Award on mobile computing. She received Stevens Board of Trustees Award for Scholarly Excellence 2010 and the New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame Innovators Award 2012. She is also the recipient of the Best Paper Award from ACM International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom) 2011 and International Conference on Wireless On-demand Network Systems and Services (WONS) 2009, as well as the Best Technological Innovation Award from the International TinyOS Technology Exchange 2006. She is serving on the journal editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC), IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications (TWC), IEEE Computer Network Magazine, and EURASIP Journal on Information Security. Her research has been reported by numerous media outlets including the Wall Street Journal, MIT Technology Review, Inside Science TV, Tonight Show with Jay Leno, NPR, and CNET.